In the final years of Stan Lee’s life, Jon Bolerjack (and his camera) became a fixture wherever the Marvel icon went. He followed Lee around the world to comic book conventions and to movie premieres. His captured charming moments and candid conversations at Lee’s Hollywood Hills home. But Bolerjack says his camera also captured bad behavior among Lee’s inner circle.
Over the past few years, he has been turning hundreds of hours of footage into a documentary called Stan Lee: The Final Years, a film that was a secret until today. Bolerjack has unveiled a trailer and a Kickstarter campaign to complete work on the project, which he says he poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into.
It’s already been well documented that Lee had a tumultuous final few years. A 2018 The Hollywood Reporter investigation detailed allegations of elder abuse amid a power struggle for control of Lee’s care and his estate. But Bolerjack contends things were even worse than previously known, and that Lee was in financial ruin time of his death at age 95 in November 2018.
The trailer tells the story of an elderly icon who is being carted around to comic book signings despite being exhausted. Though the trailer doesn’t name the people shown in the footage, one is Max Anderson, Lee’s former road manager who figured into the THR investigation and has previously denied any wrongdoing regarding his work with Lee.
Bolerjack, a comic book fanatic who studied documentaries at film school, met Lee a decade ago through a mutual friend to pitch Lee on making a reality show. Lee agreed, and soon Bolerjack became part of the comic book creator’s entourage.
But it became apparent that Lee’s demanding schedule — traveling to conventions and spending hours signing autographs — was taking its toll. Bolerjack says he tried to help how he could, and acknowledges he broke the “cardinal rule” of documentary filmmaking by growing close to his subject.
“I grew to look at him as a friend, as family, and I really wanted to be there to advocate for him,” Bolerjack says, adding that he attempted to lessen the workload for Lee and advocated for more breaks. “I was doing the best I could.”
Lee had a carefully crafted public persona as the eternally upbeat pitchman for all things Marvel and comics, so it feels surprising that he would also have been happy with low points in his life being part of a documentary. But Bolerjack says that Lee did give his blessing, and knew the reality show would instead become a doc.
“I spoke to him about this at length, even toward the very end of his life. A lot of things have happened to him, but I didn’t get the real sense that he felt shame about it,” Bolerjack says. “I think he wanted it out there to be that sort of warning.”
